Privacy Policy
Effective October 6, 2026
Oriole Voice (“we”, “us”) is a Mac app for dictation and meeting notes. This policy covers the app, the Pro subscription, and oriolevoice.com.
The short version
- Speech recognition runs on your Mac. Your audio never leaves it.
- The free app sends nothing you say or type to us.
- Pro sends text, never audio, to our server, which passes it to an AI model and keeps none of it.
- We don’t sell data, run ads, or use trackers.
What stays on your Mac
Audio recordings, transcripts, the notes you type, generated meeting notes, dictation history, and your vocabulary are stored on your Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/com.oriolevoice.app. We have no copy. Deleting that folder deletes them.
To work, the app also reads, on your Mac: your calendars, to list upcoming meetings and name recordings; which app and website you are dictating into; and the text around the cursor, to decide whether a dictation starts a new sentence and keeps its final period. The app never stores that text. The free app sends none of this anywhere. Pro sends only what the Pro section below lists.
The command for AI apps
Oriole Voice includes a command, oriole, that your own AI apps can read your meetings and dictations with. It is read-only and it sends nothing anywhere, so what your AI app does with what it reads is between you and that app. Use with AI Apps shows how to connect one.
The speech model download
The first time the app opens, it downloads its speech models from Hugging Face (huggingface.co). As with any download, Hugging Face receives your IP address. Nothing about your audio or your words is sent.
Updates
The app checks for updates by fetching an update feed from downloads.oriolevoice.com. The request carries only the app's name and version — nothing else.
Pro
These requests happen only with a Pro subscription. The automatic ones happen only while their switch in Settings, Account, is on; the rest happen only when you ask for them.
- Clean up dictation in the cloud sends the text of each dictation, the bundle ID of the app you are dictating into (for example
com.apple.mail), and, in a browser, the website’s domain (for examplemail.google.com). It also sends the terms in your Vocabulary list, used only to spell them correctly. It also sends up to 2,000 characters of the text near your cursor in the window you are dictating into, such as the conversation above a chat box, so names and terms come out right. It never sends text from a password field or a password manager, a screenshot, your clipboard, or the full web address. - Write meeting notes after each call sends the meeting’s transcript with its timestamps and speaker labels, the notes you typed, and the names of the calendar event’s other guests (or their email address when the calendar has no name), which are used only to spell names correctly. Pressing Generate, Refresh, or Retry notes on a meeting sends the same, even with the switch off.
- Asking a question about your meetings, by pressing Enter in the search field, sends your question and the passages of your transcripts and meeting notes that match it, each with its meeting’s title, date, and time in the meeting. Nothing is sent while you type, and never your whole meeting history.
- Every Pro request carries your license key and activation ID, so our server can confirm your subscription.
The text goes from your Mac to our server, a Cloudflare Worker. Our server sends it to OpenRouter, which routes it to an AI model provider. Every request requires a provider that has committed to neither retain the text nor train on it (OpenRouter’s zero data retention). Prompt logging is turned off on our OpenRouter account. The result comes back to your Mac and nowhere else.
Our server never writes your text to its logs or anywhere else. It remembers three things: for a short time, whether a license key is valid; for one minute, how many requests a license has made; and for each license, how much Pro it has used this month. It files each under a scrambled form of the key rather than the key itself.
Payments
Polar (polar.sh) sells Pro as the merchant of record. Polar collects your payment details, email address, and billing address, handles sales tax and receipts, and issues your license key. We never see your card number. We can see your email address and subscription status in Polar, to give you support. Polar’s own privacy policy covers what it does with your information.
This website
oriolevoice.com sets no cookies, runs no analytics or advertising scripts, and loads nothing from other sites. Cloudflare serves it and processes each visitor’s IP address to do so.
If you join the waitlist, we store your email address only to tell you when Pro is available. Email us and we will remove it.
What we don’t do
We don’t sell or share personal information, show ads, or use your audio or text to train AI models.
Your choices
- Turn off either Pro switch in Settings, Account, to stop sending that kind of text. Everything else keeps working on your Mac.
- Cancel Pro at any time through Polar.
- Delete
~/Library/Application Support/com.oriolevoice.appto delete your recordings, transcripts, notes, dictations, and vocabulary. The app also keeps its speech models in~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio, its settings in~/Library/Preferences/com.oriolevoice.app.plist, temporary files in~/Library/Caches/com.oriolevoice.app, and, with Pro, your license key as thecom.oriolevoice.app.licenseitem in Keychain Access. Delete those too if you want them gone. - Email us with any request about your information, including access or deletion of anything we hold, which is at most your waitlist email or your Polar customer record.
Children
Oriole Voice is only for people 18 and older. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone younger.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date. We will email Pro subscribers before a change that affects what Pro sends or keeps.